Daily Archives: July 23, 2013

On yesterday’s O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly began with an angry rant laced with statistics that he claimed showed that blacks in America are to blame for their own position at or near the bottom of the economic ladder. I distrust statistics because they can be used to prove or disprove anything. Race relations between black and whites in America is a complicated subject that I believe O’Reilly does not understand. He confuses causes and effects, perhaps not able to understand that the statistics he embraces so warmly relate to effects, not the root causes.

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As a biracial child who spent part of his youth abroad, Barack Obama learned the feeling of otherness and became attuned to how he was perceived by those around him. As a politician, he knew well that many white people saw him as a vehicle for their hopes for a post-racial society. Even if those hopes were somewhat naïve, they came from a sincere and admirable desire, and he was happy to let those sentiments carry him along. Part of the bargain, though, was that he had to be extremely careful about how he talked about race, and then only on the rarest of occasions. His race had to be a source of hope and pride—for everybody—but not of displeasure, discontent, or worst of all, a grievance that would demand redress. No one knew better than him that everything was fine only as long as we all could feel good…

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The White House intern whose affair with President Bill Clinton nearly got him kicked out of office has made a point of of declining interviews as she builds a new life. Here’s a look back at what she has done since the scandal died down after Clinton was acquitted of impeachment charges in February 1999.

A record-breaking 70 million viewers watched Barbara Walters interview Monica Lewinsky on ABC’s 20/20. “Where was your self-respect?” asked Walters in her trademark caring-cutting style. “Where was your self-esteem?” The 25-year-old famously apologized to the Clintons and the nation.

March 1999: The memoirist

Lewinsky’s authorized biography, “Monica’s Story,” traces her White House antics back to emotional scars from adolescence, including a struggle with an eating disorder and a tumultuous series of love affairs. New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani wrote that the…

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The Florida woman’s dream was to swim with the mermaids at the Florida Aquarium, an idea she took to after she and her 10-year-old son saw the aquarium’s mermaids perform at the Tampa Bay Renaissance Fair earlier this year. “I was so absolutely enthralled by what I saw,” she told the Tampa Bay Times. The full-time hairdresser suffered a brain tumor seven years ago causing her to lose the use of her legs. After having to re-learn how to walk, Conti told herself, “It’s time to start doing the things you want to do.” Hence her willingness to follow the siren’s song and live out her mermaid dream. Conti knew that she had to practice though, which is why she went to her community’s pool to practice swimming in a custom-made blue silicone tail.

Sherri Shepherd of ABC’s “The View’ has not exactly been the most ardent champion of gay rights in the past, having supported Proposition 8 in 2008. But yesterday on the show she commented that if Virgina GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cucinelli — who is intent on reinstating Virginia’s Crimes Against Nature law — really thinks oral sex (between any two people) is the same as gay sex, then she, a self-professed evangelical Christian, “is gayer than a gay two-dollar bill.”

Is this really where the GOP is going in 2013, taking on straight sex too? And that raises yet another question: Is it time for a reporter to ask Cucinelli, currently the Virginia attorney general, if he’s ever engaged in cunnilingus or had anyone go down on him? Is American politics truly headed in that direction as the GOP defies political analysts as well as the beliefs and practices of the vast majority of Americans and continues to pander to extremists within in its base?

In 2012, we saw two political candidates who could not have been more starkly different on gay rights and some predicted it was the last time we’d see it. President Obama supported marriage equality, while Mitt Romney supported a constitutional ban on gay marriage. When Romney lost, and as polls showed majority support in the country for gay marriage, political analysts, pundits and even the Republican National Committee chair himself, Reince Preibus, predicted GOP candidates would need to change the tone on gay rights. After the Supreme Court’s gay marriage rulings last month, the predictions only continued, with some even saying that momentum in the Republican Party is moving toward changing with the times.

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“In the jewelry store, they lock the case when I walk in,” the young African-American man wrote. “In the shoe store, they help the white man who walks in after me. In the shopping mall they follow me. … Black male: Guilty until proven innocent.”

“I have lost control of my emotions,” he declared. “Rage, Frustration, Anguish, Despondency, Fatigue, Bitterness, Animosity, Exasperation, Sadness. Emotions once suppressed, emotions once channeled, now are let loose. Why?”

The words came not in response to the George Zimmerman verdict in the Trayvon Martin killing but to the acquittal of the police officers in the Rodney King case. The author of the May 6, 1992, column in the Stanford University student newspaper: Cory Booker, now the nationally celebrated mayor of Newark and the frontrunner to be the next United States senator from New Jersey.